


Asphyxiation

by Keemax



Category: Uta no Prince-sama
Genre: Also: Merry Christmas to Ami! I hope you like it!, But maybe not, Kind of description heavy, Merman!Ai, Other, Reader not written with a specific gender in mind, anyway Ai is gorgeous and that's the main thing I was trying to get across, kind of sort of related to a merman!utapri au I'm working on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 20:26:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17148542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keemax/pseuds/Keemax
Summary: You'd never heard his voice, but sometimes you could swear he called to you in the lull of night, sending ripples across the edges of your dreams.You wanted to see him. Just once.How could you resist?





	Asphyxiation

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Secret Santa 2018 gift for mikazeliscious on Twitter! ;)

Your uncle had told you not to go near the tank.

It stood like a column of crystal in the centre of his laboratory. A wide cylinder of molten aquamarine that glowed the same bright florescent hue as something you might find in or glowstick, or one of those tiny glass vials you see in movies. The ones kept in those smooth silver briefcases and padded in place by a black foam inlay smothered under crushed velvet. The ones actors would pretend contained some description of planet-saving serum or extra-terrestrial antidote.

It was just water, of course.

You hadn’t seen him install it, but you knew there was a lamp of sorts beneath the tank that was the cause of such an iridescent halo. Knowing that didn’t make the scene any less ethereal, and when you slipped past the deadbolt barring the outside of the door you adopted the same wide-eyed stare that always seemed to settle across your face whenever you crossed the threshold.

He needed sunlight, your uncle had said, it’s not as if they could simply open a window down here.

The room was framed with solid stone walls that held back raw earth instead of open air and its edges cluttered with old-fashioned work desks – simple, squared, the bare pale pine teeming with paperwork and half-finished mechanical projects. Without the overhead light, however, all of it lay hidden under a thick swatch shadow, their unrefined edges shifting in the dark like the reeds waving in a riverbed. 

But none of that mattered. The excess of blue light dripped down and over all of it, leaving a shimmering sheen that made the room appear as though it was no more than the rough, eroded walls of an underwater grotto, and grew thicker the closer you crept toward the tank.

The glassed pressed a frosted kiss to your palm when you laid your hand upon it.

He was asleep.

His long lavender tail was smooth, sleek and scaleless. Either side of it had a ruffle of pale lilac running from his hip and leading to a soft, almost feathered-looking, point at the very tip. They had a semi-translucent quality to them and were the same shade as the palm-sized almond-shaped fins on either side of his head, roughly where his ears should have been. His skin was the flawless expanse of a near milk-white confection that cradled the delicate contours of his bared chest and abdomen. His arms were lithe, and his wrists were encased in some kind of netted material – like fishnet gloves, only these seemed to be made with thicker rope.

Your uncle had fashioned them from an old fisherman’s net he’d bought at the market. When you’d asked about it, he only shook his head and muttered under his breath.

You’d managed to catch ‘fragile’ amidst the hushed ruckus. But that was about it. 

But there was something distinctly feminine about the man in the tank.

It might have had something to do with the way his long lashes rested against his cheeks, the slight shadow they cast making them appear thicker and fuller, but you were more convinced that his hair was the main attraction. It whispered like silk within the water, or billows of smoke caught slow motion. It was a vivid and vibrant cyan half pulled back into a bun behind his head while the other half fell loose over the right side of his face.

His eyes were the exact same colour. You knew because you’d seen them before.

But only once.

The image was stuck to the backs of your eyelids for you to gawk at everytime they shut. It was a still silhouette to begin with, just the merman with his back to you, his head tilted towards the top of the tank, your uncle’s shoes perched on the topmost rung of the ladder he’d placed on the far side of it.

And then the merman had sunk a little lower and turned his head away and to the side and locked eyes with you through the glass.

There was a beat. Electricity had run down your spine. Then your uncle’s shoes were fumbling down the ladder two rungs at a time before he was grabbing your shoulders and ushering you out of the room.

You mussn’t. He’d pleaded.

You mussn’t, you mussn’t, you _mussn’t._

But it hardly mattered.

You traced a pattern on the side of the tank and watch him float, before craning your neck behind you to see if you can spot where the ladder had been moved to. You thought you saw it propped against the desk in the far corner. If you could jus-

There was a soft _thunk_ from inside the tank.

You turned to look - more out of instinct than the result of any specific thought process - and were immediately met with those same cyan blue irises.

For a split fraction of a second, the sharp spine of shock ricocheted throughout your form and every muscle in your body tensed at the same moment. Coiled and ready to spring backwards, to race beyond the door to …. to…

His eyes seemed to glow and his pupils to dilate, but maybe it was only a trick of the light.

Your muscles loosened, and your breathing evened. The cooling arms of comfort dammed the rushing river rioting in your veins and pulsed in time with your heartbeat as it slowed, flowing through you in overlapping echoes, like the gentle sway of the tide.

You couldn’t seem to recall your previous thread of thought.

You simply stood there as he observed you, his gaze flitting from the curve of your collarbone to the stretch of your wrist. When he met your eyes again, you swallowed, numb with the sensation of whitewash crashing over your mind once more.

_Had you woken him? Had he really been asleep to begin with?_

His name was Ai. You’d managed to glean that much from the scant few seconds you’d seen your uncle’s notes.

Ai had both palms pressed to the inside of the glass. The expression on his face was somewhere between contempt and curiosity – his mouth in a hard flat line and his face tilted just slightly to the left. 

Your arms were stiff, your body made of lead, pins prickling along the length of your spine.

He peeled one hand off the glass and pointed to you, then made a curling motion with two fingers and gestured towards the top of the tank.

_Yes, the top of the tank. Yes, you had t-_

Your movements jerked, like a marionette in the hands of a child, like there were hooks in your limbs and a spike through the halves of your brain. Your skin tingled. Your fingers shook.

_Theladdertheladdertheladderthela-_

Within moments the ladder was pushed flush against the glass and your left foot was already testing its weight on the bottom rung. One by one they passed beneath your feet as you hauled yourself to the very top in a series of swift, strong steps.

Your palms gripped the outer lip of the tank, sticky with sweat, but harbouring steel in regard to strength. You leaned forward – not as far as you dared, but far enough that you’d fall in in you were pushed – and watched his distorted silhouette swim upwards to meet you. It looked like an inkblot, or even a bullseye where the tank was the target.

There was a splash of water as he surfaced. It was small, but unprecedented and made you snap your eyes shut on instinct. The second you did something large, warm and wet pressed against your forehead and your pulse both stopped and skyrocketed all at once.

You opened one eye slowly, only to see one of his cyan irises no more than an inch from your own. Your lungs stuttered. Your mouth flapped uselessly. You thought you might swallow your own tongue.

Your breath came in short bursts, like fireworks launched without a pattern, as if he might disappear if you so much as blew air in his direction. A sudden fleet of snow had begun to swirl across your consciousness, coating and covering the tracks of your thought, burying them deeper and deeper the longer he held you there. Your eyelids fluttered, and a shiver rolled across your shoulders.

From this distance you could see the individual water droplets drag themselves down his cheeks and fuse at his chin. You focused on them like a cat might trace a speck of dust as it moves through the air, until your attention is ultimately brought to his mouth when the very tip of his tongue winked up at you and he used it to wet his bottom lip.

His tongue was a dark orchid, but that’s not something you really notice at the moment.

Not now at least. Not when the universe so very obviously revolved around the way he tilted his face to bring his mouth closer to yours. Not when you could feel his heat feathering your lips or the phantom taste of salt collecting on your tongue. Not when … not when ….

He stopped moving.

His was merely a handful of millimeters away, but refused to move a hair’s width closer, and remained as cold and as still as marble. You, on the other hand, seemed to flicker and vibrate on the spot, barely able to keep your joints locked in place.

So it was you that moved forward.

But your advance – as jerked and as sudden and as awkward as it was – was met with empty air. You blinked. Ai’s forehead was still pressed to yours and his mouth was just as close as before and yet…

And yet…

You moved forward again. And again. And again. Each time Ai moved with you and you only ended up leaning further and further out over the edge of the tank. 

But it didn’t matter. _Itdidn’tmatterItdidn’tmatterItdidn’tmatter_ because-

Your nose dipped below the surface of the water.

You snorted on instinct – which was a very poor decision, really – and tried to spring upright within the next instant. For half a minute you were a tangled knot of confusion as your body attempted five different functions at once: your lungs spasmed to eject the liquid you’d inadvertently inhaled, your elbows shook with the strain of keeping your entire upper body out of the water, your hands slipped and slid along the tank’s rim, and your feet switched between waving frantically in the air and trying to anchor your body to the ladder to keep your balance.

Your eyes stung. Your chest heaved. You managed not to fall into Ai’s tank.

You blinked three times in rapid succession to clear your vision.

Ai was there just below the water’s surface. That same concoction of contempt and curiosity stained his features, as if he were witnessing a fish attempting to fly.

He held your gaze long enough for you to consider the idea of moving back down the ladder. Long enough for your foot to twitch and to slowly seek out the rung just below you. Long enough for you to begin shifting your weight onto that foot in order to move the other.

With a flick of his tail, he surged upwards again and broke the surface once more, this time reaching and clasping your left shoulder with one hand and pulling you towards him, back out over the open tank. You squirmed in his grasp like and eel caught on a string, but then his mouth was flush against your ear and he whispered something right into it.

You can’t quite remember what it was.

You stopped, loosened, and went limp. The snow had hardened to ice and any fragment of thought lay trapped in its midst. You were aware of exactly one thing, and that was Ai’s softened lips trailing from your earlobe and down to the juncture of your neck. He didn’t leave kisses in his wake, instead his lips moved in a kind of pulsing pattern against your skin, as if he was continuously speaking something into it. Perhaps and incantation. Perhaps a song.

The rim of the tank dug into the exposed slice of your waist and your torso rested fully on Ai’s chest, where he’s wrapped both arms around you to keep you in place. One of your arms had fallen to the side and dunked your hand into the water. You watched it ripple between your fingers.

When Ai bit down just above your collarbone, the world didn’t go black before you lost consciousness.

It went white.

And your uncle cried the next morning when he saw the mark Ai had left upon that patch of skin – a stark lilac brand in the shape of a prince's crown.

**Author's Note:**

> So, for clarification purposes, the crown brand that Ai left on the Reader's skin is basically a stake/claim of ownership. I know that kind of concept isn't necessarily associated with merfolk/siren lore, but, as I said, this piece is sort of distantly related to a larger au project that I'm working on, so I did borrow some of the ideology I was using for that


End file.
